For many website owners, SEO is a maze of confusing and conflicting advice, obscure tech-porn protocols, and voodoo-like code. Yet a search engine like Google is typically where your website’s engagement with potential visitors begins. Your business needs to be visible at the moment a potential customer is searching online for a business just like yours.

Hence, you need to fine-tune your website to ensure it matches the latest needs of Google’s ever-evolving search engine algorithm.

Beyond Keywords

Search engine algorithms not only rate keyword relevance on web pages, and in your meta data, to terms user’s search for, but they also consider user experience and overall usability of your website including:

Time visitors spend on your site

Pages viewed

Broken links

Bounce rate

Inbound and outbound links

So how do you tweak your website to transform it into a lead generating machine? The answer lies in adopting the following six simple SEO tips, guaranteed to boost your website ranking.

1. Content Is Compelling So Write For Your Visitors, Not For Soulless Search Engines

Your website’s ability to attract visitors and keep them exploring the site depends greatly on the quality of your content. No point generating epic traffic volumes if they bounce straight off your website. Here’s some ways to help improve your content to make it suitable for visitors and not search engines.

Create personas to provide a focus on the audience you’re writing for.

Don’t be afraid to evolve a unique voice that appeals to your audience and authentically brings your brand to life.

Engage your audience by asking them questions, offering them free downloads and asking them to subscribe to email or newsletter lists.

Write on topics they want to hear about. You can check Google search bar to see what people have been searching for.

Make sure the content is free from spelling and grammar mistakes as this can make you appear unprofessional.

2. Adopt Friendly URLs For WebPages

Friendly URLs include keywords in your content link and improving both the website visitor experience and your SEO ranking by making the links easy to read and easy to understand. Why adopt friendly URLs?

Keywords in the URL help confirm to visitors seeing your URL on social media, in an email or hovering on a link that they're getting what they’re looking for

The URL serves as an anchor text if the URL is copied and pasted without including an anchor text in the link.

Keywords in the URL are displayed in search results, and the URL is one of the most considered searching elements when selecting which site to click through to.

So, take the opportunity to enhance your visitor experience and improve your SEO performance by including keywords in your URL. As seen from the image below the keyword is ‘How To Build A Deck’. The first example features the keyword in the URL, while the second one doesn’t. This makes the first one more appealing because it features the exact search results in the URL.

Using a tool like Varvy SEO or ContentForest to identify images lacking alternative text.

4. Declare War On Clone Titles and Descriptions

Adopting standard templates saves development time and money when building a website. However, if you copy a page directly across and clone it, often its title and description are also duplicated. Duplication confuses search engine algorithms and this impacts your search rankings. How do you stop this?

Validate your new website pages

Rename new pages and refresh their descriptions

Use a tool such as Copyscape.com, Siteliner or Serpstat to discover duplicated

5. Rev Up Your Page Load Speed

Your page load speed is one of the factors incorporated into both Google and Bing’s page ranking algorithm. Visitors are notoriously impatient. A one second delay can result in:

Fewer page views

A decrease in customer satisfaction

A loss in conversions

Similarly:

It’s expected for a website to load within 2-3 seconds.

If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors will abandon their search of your website.

Loyalty of a website may improve with faster loading times.

The implication is clear, making your visitors wait for a page to load spikes your bounce rate, punishes your dwell time and reduces the number of pages a visitor is likely to view. Address your page load by:

Checking your page speed with one of the many free online tools available

Integrating a caching plug-in

Ensuring your website code is streamlined

Optimizing the size of the images on your website

Reducing the number of plug-ins

Minimizing page redirects

6. Be Mobile-Friendly

Mobile is about to make the jump into hyperspace from a descriptive to a generic term. Mobile consumptionand usage continue to surge as smartphones and tablets propel the growth of organic search. Search engines such as Google and Bing are awarding higher rankings to mobile-friendly websites. Because of this it’s important to validate your website’s performance using the Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Last Word

If you’re looking to climb the Google rankings mountain, avoiding common mistakes many websites make when setting up or updating their site. Follow these simple tips and watch a flood of free organic traffic flow into your website as your SEO ranking soars. Are you ready to improve your website ranking?

Bill Sheikh is the founder of U-Thrive Marketing, Tulsa’s premier digital marketing and website design agency. He has helped hundreds of businesses across Oklahoma and the rest of the United States put their business on the map online. They specialize in generating customers for the businesses they work with by utilizing proven online marketing tactics such as SEO, PPC & Social Media marketing. He has also been personally featured on many national and local publications related to online marketing.